“To judge by the name, it seems to be a promising connection: Jürgen as in George the Dragon Slayer with the defiant lofty eagle’s eyrie in Horst and the earthbound rootedness in Stoffel—plus the North Star, Astrid, over the delicate sociological synthesis of von and Bürger—the nobility of the mind, no doubt?”

Nagel bared a fang.

“Is she blond?” I asked.

No. He was blond: Stoffel. Straw blond. She was dark. An Icelandic queen. I was shown a photo (charming dedication, primitively printed: “To the Nagel in my coffin!—Astrid”)—

Aha, so she was the one . . .

•

I should have known, of course. It’s true I rarely go (and rarely went back then) to the movies, but this face had been hard to get away from in the last years of the war, even outside the movie theater.

Even after carpet bombs had flattened whole city districts, the unshakeable effigy of the beautiful Astrid had kept smiling down from tattered posters at the population (who, according to Reich Minister Goebbels, were not intimidated even by such acts of terrorism) or was wafted along on the singed front page of the Berliner Illustrierte, fluttering in the warm-air currents over the glowing remains of conflagrations. The face was beautiful, alert, bold, and base—the human epitome of the invincible baseness of the capital of the German Reich . . .

But good old Nagel couldn’t know anything of this. For all his knowledge of the world (“The Bulgarian is the Prussian of the Balkans”), Berlin remained a blank spot on his intellectual map. Berlin in general, and certainly the Berlin shortly before and shortly after Stalingrad. At that time, he had been in the war, good old Nagel, risking his neck, while I . . .

For me, in any case, this picture of a sassy female face surrounded by Brunhilde hair immediately brought to mind very specific associations—

I was afflicted by an entire era: three years of draft-dodging in a virtually manless city crashed in on me; the cynicism of these years melded with a cheeky spiritus loci, the bad spirit of a city that has given up its spirit . . . I could hear its (to my Austrian ears) dreadful jargon, the pulp-novel name Astrid von Bürger evoked a whole Berlin ballad, churned out of a hurdy-gurdy like a lyrical toilet-paper roll, collapsing at the end of each stanza in a rooty-toot-toot as if under a cascade of shards, and then unabashedly straightening up again like a bounce-back doll. I was irresistibly tempted to do something malicious: hadn’t Nagel betrayed me, his bosom buddy, in the beautiful crèche period, to Hertzog? Hadn’t he betrayed our sacred buddyship even further by retreating into his garden house and assiduously writing without letting me in on his plans, his ordeals and triumphs? . . . Very well! I could write too. It was mainly valuable for myself; an act of overcoming the past—but, of course, it was primarily meant to be funny (in the spirit of my school days in Vienna, naturally): I wanted to make Nagel laugh. And if the verses of the poem that I dedicated to the “poet” Nagel evinced all my hatred of recent historical events, then it was, as Stoffel would have said, “on account of the times.” I, for my part, wanted to amuse the good Nagel, not shock, much less offend him. Not even with the title of the poem: